Automobiles and other vehicles have come to employ safety systems which include radar technologies for detecting a location of an object or target with respect to the vehicle so that a driver or collision-avoidance device can react accordingly. A radar system includes a transmitter for sending out a source signal and a receiver for receiving an echo or reflection of the source signal from the target. The received signal (the echo signal) is sampled at a selected sampling frequency and the sampled data points of the received signal are entered into a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in order to determine a dominant frequency of the reflected signal. Various parameters and dimensions of the target, which are determined from the dominant frequency, are then used to provide an echo signal representative of the target in a data cube.
Due to the time-limited nature of digital sampling techniques, the echo signal in the data cube is not a centralized point but instead displays a central peak with multiple side lobes. The presence of side lobes produces complications when attempting to distinguish multiple echo signals from one another. For example, when a first target and a second target are in close proximity of each other, a side lobe of a first echo signal (representative of the first target) can overlap a peak of a second echo signal (representative of the second target). When the first echo signal is much stronger or more intense than the second echo signal, the side lobe of the first echo signal can mask the presence of the second echo signal, or alter the appearance of the second echo signal, thereby making accurate determination of parameters for the second echo signal difficult. Similarly, the presence of the second echo signal alters the appearance of the first echo signal and makes it difficult to accurately determinate parameters for the first echo signal. Accordingly, it is desirable to correct for the effect of echo signals on one another in order to distinguish multiple target signals from each other.